Falling From the Edge of Space: Chuck Yeager's Wild Ride

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further orders for the entire year so if you want to cash in on comfort this year you can get 20 off your first order by visiting macweldon.com forward slash brain food 20 and entering the promo code brain food 20. you'll love it and let's get into the video [Music] first introduced in 1954 the lockheed f-104 starfighter looked like something out of science fiction designed by legendary aircraft designer clarence kelly johnson mastermind behind the u2 a12 and sr-71 spy planes the f-104 was built around the powerful general electric j-79 jet engine and featured an unusually slender needle-shaped fuselage and short stubby wings earning it the nickname the missile with a man in it and it certainly had the performance to match being the first production aircraft capable of achieving speeds of mach 2 and reaching altitudes of a hundred thousand feet after taking off under its own power yet despite this the f-104 tenure with the u.s air force was surprisingly brief being retired in 1969 after barely 11 years of service this early retirement was attributed to the type's low payload capacity and the air force's shift towards more dedicated interceptor aircraft but the f-104 was far more successful in foreign service with examples being sold to 14 allied nations including canada west germany italy and japan unfortunately while the aircraft was designed for high out-dude superiority into deception many nations pressed the f-104 into the all-weather low-level attack role one for which it was particularly ill-suited accidents were common leading to german pilots dubbing the f-104 the widowmaker furthermore in 1976 it was revealed that lockheed had paid some 22 million in bribes to foreign officials to entice them to buy the starfighter regardless of its suitability for their needs nonetheless the f-104 soldiered on for nearly 50 years with the last examples being retired from the italian air force in 2004. however one operator who did put the f-104's blistering high-altitude performance to good use was nasa who in the early 1960s used the aircraft to train a generation of new astronauts and nearly killed the world's greatest test pilot in the process in the early days of the space race the us air force ran its own parallel space program built around military objectives unlike nasa whose mercury program used a ballistic space capsule which was launched atop rockets and splashed down in the ocean via parachute air force efforts focused on more sophisticated winged space planes which could take off and land like regular aircraft and the first such effort was the boeing x-20 dinosaur shaw for dynamic sora dinosaur was a small two-manned craft similar to the latest space shuttle designed to be launched atop a titan missile orbit the earth and make an unpaired descent to a landing on a normal runway in orbit the dinosaur would perform a variety of tasks such as launching satellites area reconnaissance or even carrying out nuclear attacks on the soviet union the engineering challenges presented by the x-20 were immense so in 1955 the air force and nasa contracted north american aviation to design the x-15 an experimental rocket-powered aircraft to investigate the problems of high-speed high-altitude flight launch from a b-52 mother ship and powered by a reaction motors xlr 99 rocket engine producing 57 000 pounds of thrust the x-15 was the fastest manned aircraft ever built reaching a speed of 7 374 kilometers an hour or max 6.7 on october 3rd 1967. until the june the 21st 2004 flight of scaled composite spaceship won it was also the highest flying reaching a maximum altitude of 353 330 feet above the internationally recognized boundary of outer space indeed eight x-15 pilots were awarded their astronaut wings while two further nasa astronauts cut their teeth on the aircraft including neil armstrong the first man to walk on the moon however the x-15 was an extremely difficult and expensive aircraft to fly and the air force soon began looking for a less expensive machine on which to train its future x20 pilots they found it in the venerable f-104 starfighter in 1960 the air force changed the name of its famous experimental flight test pilot school at edwards air force base in the mojave desert to the aerospace research pilot school or arps in order to reflect their new space flight ambitions and the man chosen to run the school was none other than colonel charles e chuck yeager who on october the 14th 1947 had been the first man to break the sound barrier in level flight at first the arps used unmodified f-104s to simulate the x-15 and x-20s high-speed unpowered landing approach a highly dangerous maneuver that left little room for error pilots were required to fly to twelve thousand feet and make their descent with their engine throttled back to eighty percent and their flaps landing gear and speed brakes extended a configuration which gave the f-104 handling characteristics which were likened to flying a brick but teaching future astronauts how to handle a craft in the vacuum of space where regular aerodynamic controls are ineffective required that extensive modifications be made to the aircraft lockheed was contracted to take three f-104s out of storage and convert them to aerospace trainer or ast configuration with the new type being designated the nf-104a and standing for non-standard this involves stripping out all non-essential military equipment such as guns radar and avionics modifying the engine intakes for better high speed performance and fitting hydrogen peroxide fuel thrusters in the nose and wings these will allow the pilot to control the aircraft in the thin air of the upper atmosphere where regular aerodynamic controls would be ineffective to get the aircraft to those altitudes it was fitted with a rocketdyne ar23 rocket engine mounted under the tail which produced six thousand pounds of thrust for around a hundred seconds a digital flight profile required the pilot to climb to thirty-five thousand feet and accelerate to mach 1.9 before igniting the rocket engine upon reaching mach 2.1 the pilot would then pitch up to a climb angle of 50 to 70 degrees and zoom climb at 85 000 feet the jet engine would be manually shut down leaving the pilot to climb on rocket power alone until the fuel was exhausted at apogee the pilot would experience several minutes of weightlessness as he coasted through a parabolic arc during which he would use the control thrusters to keep the aircraft stable until it descended into thicker air and the jet engine could be restarted if the pilot followed the proper zoom climb profile the nf-104 could theoretically reach altitudes in excess of 120 000 feet though the mission of the arps was to train future astronauts every trainee knew that reaching such altitudes would constitute a new world record smashing the previous record of 113 891 feet set by soviet pilot grigori morselov on april 28 1961. this goal proved irresistible and on december 6 1963 major robert w smitty smith piloted the nf-104 to an altitude of 120 800 feet unfortunately this was only an unofficial record as the aircraft was not fitted with official international aeronautical federation measuring equipment not to be outdone on december the 10th colonel yeager decided to have a go at piloting the nf-104 to its maximum altitude jaeger had flown the aircraft several times before to get a feel for its climb profile only to discover that he was not up to the task despite being a natural pilot and a legend in the aviation community jaeger was relatively uneducated for a test pilot having only completed the first half of his test pilot course before breaking the sound barrier in 1947. indeed during the nf104 program the commander of edwards air force base general charles g boyd discovered that jaeger was technically unqualified to fly experimental test flights and forced him to complete a six-month stability and control course before returning to duty despite this jaeger's lack of theoretical aerospace knowledge made him unsuited to the nf-104's particular foibles controlling a spacecraft in a near vacuum is nothing like controlling a regular aircraft in the atmosphere rendering jaeger's stick and rudder instincts useless this did not bode well for his attempt on the world record jaeger booked two flights on december 10th one in the morning and one in the afternoon the first flight was a disappointment with jager failing to maintain the proper climb angle and consequently only reaching 100 000 feet the second flight went slightly better with jaeger clearing 108 000 feet suddenly however everything started to go very wrong as in his previous flight jaeger struggled to maintain the proper climb angle and as he reached the top of his climb he pulled up too sharply causing the aircraft to stall and begin wobbling violently despite his best efforts jaeger was unable to wrestle the aircraft back under control and the wobble spiraled into an unrecoverable flat spin his engine dead and his aircraft plummeting rapidly to earth jaeger fought the nf-104 all the way down to one mile in altitude before deciding to punch out and fire his ejection seat a small rocket engine in the seat ignited and propelled him out of the cockpit though now clear of the doomed aircraft jaeger wasn't out of trouble yet ordinarily when a pilot ejects aerodynamic forces separate them cleanly from the ejection seat but the nf-104 was falling straight downwards so jaeger and his seat fell together this resulted in the seat striking the helmet on his pressure suit cracking the faceplate and allowing flames from the still burning rocket engine to enter and ignite the rubber lining in the pure oxygen environment of the suit the rubber burned fiercely filling the helmet with smoke and severely burning his face still free falling through the sky jaeger removed his suit gloves opened his faceplate and tried to smother the flames with his bare hands severely burning them in the process then his parachute automatically deployed and he landed several minutes later not far from the wreckage of the nf-104 major robert smith who rushed to the scene of the crash in a rescue helicopter described what happened next chuck started to walk towards us in his pressure suit but with helmet in hand i jumped down and ran to him was shocked by his condition one half of his face was solidly charred a deep black with a few strips of blood red it appeared to me that his skin had literally been burned off with only some pieces of flesh hanging on i started assisting him the short distance to the chopper when he suddenly turned and said he wanted his knee board used for test notes by the pilots then he said that he had taken it off and placed it under the windshield before he bailed out i tried to dissuade him but i couldn't and sure enough it was right there where he said he didn't have to climb just step up and reach in without any landing gear between belly and ground his having that recall of his actions at such a moment was a memory i've never gotten because it characterized chuck yeager under duress as it turns out much of the damage that he saw was just the burned helmet lining clinging to jaeger's skin nonetheless jaeger had suffered severe third degree burns to his face and hands which required long and painful debridement the scraping off of dead tissue to treat miraculously jaeger was saved from being partially blinded by the very impact that caused his burns when the ejection seat struck his helmet it cut a deep gash in his forehead which bled over his face the heat of the fire then cooked the blood in place forming a hard layer that protected his eye if all this sounds a bit familiar it's probably because this incident was dramatized in the classic 1983 film the right stuff with the role of chuck yeager being played by actor sam shepard the film's version of events however is slightly fictionalized with jaeger depicted as having stolen the nf-104 on a whim in order to challenge the world altitude record the real incident was only slightly less damaging to jaeger's reputation as it demonstrated that his intuitive piloting skills were no match for the new highly technical frontier of space flight it was no accident that when nasa set out to select the first mercury astronauts it insisted that all candidates be trained engineers the december 10th 1963 flight of the nf-104 would be the last of chuck yeager's attempts to break a world record it also marks the end of another era for on the same day u.s secretary of defense robert mcnamara announced the cancellation of the x-20 dinosaur program throughout the 1960s the air force would continue to try and establish a manned presence in space next developing the manned orbiting laboratory or mol a military space station designed for orbital reconnaissance but this too would eventually be cancelled in 1969 effectively placing american man space flight firmly in the hands of nasa despite the loss of the nf-104 chuck yeager continued to serve with distinction as a test pilot an air force officer commanding various air training squadrons and being promoted to brigadier general before retiring from the air force in 1975 post-retirement he toured extensively giving lectures appearing in a cameo role in the right staff and broke the sound barrier twice on the anniversary of his historic 1947 flight once in 1997 and again in 2012. the ups and downs of his long aviation career in his 1986 autobiography stated the secret to my success is that i always managed to fly another day chuck yeager died on december 7th 2020 at the age of a legend to the end bonus fact the federation aeronautique internationale or fai based in lusar switzerland is the world's governing body which administers official aviation records the fai has extremely strict rules regarding what counts as an official record including that an aircraft must be fitted with official sealed fai recording instruments other rules are more esoteric and one of these strictly interpreted might actually have denied the first man in space as official title when the soviet union launched its vostok manned space program for reasons of secrecy they decided that its cosmonauts must land in soviet-held territory as the soviets did not control sufficiently large areas of ocean for an american-style splashdown recovery this meant that the space capsules had to come in over land unfortunately the vostok spacecraft was too heavy and its parachutes too small to prevent the cosmonaut from being injured on impact with the ground so the capsule was fitted with a fighter jet style ejection seat which at twenty thousand feet would launch the cosmonaut from the spacecraft and allow him to land separately on his own parachute this is how yuri gagarin landed on april 12 1961 after becoming the first man to orbit the earth unfortunately the fai rules at the time regarding manned space flight dictated that for a flight to count the astronaut must land aboard his original spacecraft the rule was a holdover from regular aviation and was intended to discourage engineers from building dangerous unlandable aircraft simply for the purposes of setting aviation records however it effectively disqualified gagarin's historic feat meaning that according to a strict interpretation of the rules the first man in space was actually american astronaut alan shepard who blasted into space on a 15-minute suborbital mission on may 5th 1961. for this reason the soviets concealed from the fai the fact that gagarin had landed separately from a spacecraft the truth would eventually emerge four months later when cosmonaut german titov the second man to orbit the earth admitted to ejecting and landing separately from a spacecraft but instead of disqualifying him in gagarin the fai convened a special meeting and decided to amend its manned space flight rules thus yuri gagarin is still officially recognized as the first man in space his historic feat celebrated every april the 12th as yuri's night so i really hope you found that video interesting if you did please do hit that thumbs up button below don't forget to subscribe and thank you for watching

Channel: Today I Found Out

Views: 79,787

Rating: 4.95152 out of 5

Keywords: today i found out, tifovidz12, tifo, awesome, facts, didn't know

Id: tG2BTJ7aeAY

Length: 15min 35sec (935 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 25 2021